Sunday, February 11, 2007

Two Cats - One Old, One New

This is Roman the cat. I still think of him as one of the kittens, but these days he weighs about a billion pounds and is gigantic. He still thinks of himself as a bitty kitty, though. This May he'll be four years old.

This is him curled up in his usual spot on the bed. He's such a relaxed puss that it's very easy for me to carry him around, use him as a barbell replacement to get my upper arm workout, and he'll just remain limp and relaxed.

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For a few months now a pretty striped cat has been turning up in the evenings, looking sweetly in the window at us on our back porch. We of course have been feeding him.

He might be living in the barn, where there is plenty of food put out each day for the barn cats. Or he might be alternating between different cat-friendly neighbors. Because he's sure not starved. He comes in each night for a little milk and to see what fresh stuff we have out.

His name has been "Pretty Puss" for a long time, but we're trying to change it to "Oliver," which is much more manly. And he is a manly cat. Complete with man-parts. So we're trying to get him friendly enough so we can take him to the vet for fixin'.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

The Call of the Kitten

Oh dear. Can you hear it? It's the call of the kitten.

If you'll recall from a recent blog entry, we had a sad experience trying to look after a semi-feral kitten some weeks ago. He managed to make a break for it and escaped through an open window when I wasn't watching him. We haven't seen this little fellow since.

That kitten had pretty much been dropped on our lap by a well-meaning neighbor who had rescued that kitten along with his two, much more friendly, sibling kitties. But something was "off" with the poor little guy. He was much more wild and spooked and probably wasn't a realistic candidate to become a house cat. But we were willing to try to work with him until he got away.

So I'm a little spooked about bringing new kitties into the house.

But the same lady who had those three kittens desperately needing home called us the other day about a new female calico kitten, about four months old. Apparently, this kitten is very people friendly and sociable, plus she's already been spayed and had some initial shots.

So this kitty might be a candidate to join our household.

Do we NEED any more cats, with seven indoor cats plus one half-feral who we feed inside each night and let back out again?

No, I wouldn't say we NEED any more cats.

But....there's this sweet little calico kitten out there and she needs a home.....

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Lion Hugs the Woman Who Was His Rescuer

There's an amazing video making the rounds on YouTube -- you just have to see it!

It's of a wonderful lion hugging the woman who rescued him from the circus.

Here's an article about her followed by the link to the video below.

By INALDO PEREZ, Associated Press Writer Sun Jan 7, 10:07 PM ET

CALI, Colombia - Through the bars of his cage, an African lion named Jupiter stretches his giant paws around the neck of Ana Julia Torres and plants a kiss on her puckered lips.

It could be a kiss of gratitude: Since Jupiter was rescued six years ago from a life of abuse and malnutrition in a traveling circus, Torres has fed and nursed him back to health at her Villa Lorena shelter for injured and mistreated animals.

"Here we have animals that are lame, missing limbs, blind, cross-eyed, disabled," said Torres, 47, who relies on donations and her own modest teacher's salary to run the shelter in a poor neighborhood in the southern city of Cali. "They come to us malnourished, wounded, burned, stabbed, with gunshots."

Torres said her work rehabilitating animals began more than a decade ago when a friend gave her an owl that had been kept as a pet. Later, when she asked her students to bring their pets to school, she realized many families illegally kept wild fauna from Colombia's biologically diverse jungles in their homes.

The number of animals under her care grew, and today Jupiter is among 800 recovering creatures at Villa Lorena — from burned peacocks and limbless flamencos to blind monkeys and mutilated elephants.

About Me

The Lipstick Mystic is your user-friendly guide to all things mystical and psychic. She is a syndicated astrology and spirituality columnist with over 2 million readers in newspapers and magazines across the US.